Abstract
BackgroundNatural disasters and infectious diseases result in widespread disruption to human health and livelihood. At the scale of a global pandemic, the co-occurrence of natural disasters is inevitable. However, the impact of natural disasters on the spread of COVID-19 has not been extensively evaluated through epidemiological modelling.MethodsWe create an agent-based epidemiology model based on COVID-19 clinical, epidemiological, and geographic data. We first model 35 scenarios with varying natural disaster timing and duration for a COVID-19 outbreak in a theoretical region. We then evaluate the potential effect of an eruption of Vesuvius volcano on the spread of COVID-19 in Campania, Italy.ResultsIn a majority of cases, the occurrence of a natural disaster increases the number of disease related fatalities. For a natural disaster fifty days after infection onset, the median increase in fatalities is 2, 59, and 180% for a 2, 14, and 31-day long natural disaster respectively, when compared to the no natural disaster scenario. For the Campania case, the median increase in fatalities is 1.1 and 2.4 additional fatalities per 100,000 for eruptions on day 1 and 100 respectively, and 60.0 additional fatalities per 100,000 for an eruption close to the peak in infections (day 50).ConclusionOur results show that the occurrence of a natural disaster in most cases leads to an increase in infection related fatalities, with wide variance in possible outcomes depending on the timing of the natural disaster relative to the peak in infections and the duration of the natural disaster.
Highlights
As of July 2021, COVID-19 has spread to over 200 countries, infected more than 188 million, and killed over 4 million people [1]
Agent based model We use geoSIR, a geospatial, agent-based model structure to account for the spread of disease and movement of individuals within the model space from a natural disaster evacuation [10, 12]
We model five counterfactual scenarios, four of which include an eruption of Vesuvius (Fig. 3) during Campania’s COVID-19 outbreak
Summary
As of July 2021, COVID-19 has spread to over 200 countries, infected more than 188 million, and killed over 4 million people [1]. A small increase in risk of epidemic outbreak following natural disasters has been identified [2, 4], very little is known about the spread of infection following a natural disaster during a pandemic such as COVID-19. Numerical modelling is an important tool for understanding and projecting the spread of infectious diseases [5, 6], including COVID-19 [7,8,9]. A common approach is to divide a population up into susceptible, infected, recovered and deceased individuals [5, 6, 10]. The impact of natural disasters on the spread of COVID-19 has not been extensively evaluated through epidemiological modelling
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